Archives for November 2011

I am currently discovering D.H. Lawrence, who was a kind of proto-Pagan. I just came across the following discussion of symbols in his Apocalypse. Written in 1930, Lawrence’s Apocalypse is a re-imagination of the Book of Revelation as a ritual initiation into a pagan mystery religion. Lawrence speaks of symbols in much the same way [Read More…]

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason. — Novalis My wife hates poetry. I think she feels intimidated by it, like it’s a secret someone is keeping from her. I like poetry. Now I am no T.S. Elliot fan, but I love Rilke and Mary Oliver. The first poet I fell in love with was [Read More…]

When I was young, I developed an unhealthy perfectionist mentality. This was a product of a combination of my own obsessive personality, the unreasonable and unpredictable expectations of a bipolar mother, and a religion (Mormonism) which took the ideal of perfection seriously [“Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is [Read More…]

“Solipsism” is a word I learned in college. It refers to the belief that only one’s own mind is real. Everything external to one’s mind is like a dream. The word is also an epithet used to describe ideas which tend toward, but are not actually, solipsistic. When I heard this word for the first [Read More…]

Here’s the outline for my family ritual for All Hallows. Because I was exhausted on Halloween, we decided to delay the ritual for a week, and so we celebrated it this past Sunday, which was closer to the mid-autumn point (Nov. 7) anyway. This ritual is geared for the ages of my children 9 and [Read More…]

About a year ago ( September 30, 2010), my uncle killed himself. I was the first time I had experienced the death of someone close to me that I loved. This past Sunday, my local UU church observed a Day of the Dead service, and my family and I remembered Dan’s passing. We brought pictures [Read More…]